Illegal Immigrant

I would not want to be the "relatively junior employee" at Christie's London who accidentally shipped an approximately $6 million Rubens to the U.S. without an export license. The Art Newspaper has the story here.

When British authorities uncovered the lapse earlier in the year, a government committee decided that:

"the virtuosity of execution and compositional creativity made this a quite exceptional work of a type not widely represented in British collections."

That prompted U.K. Culture Minister Margaret Hodge to hold off on retroactively granting an export license for the Rubens, allowing British collectors to raise rival funds, if they want. (Think Philadelphia and The Gross Clinic.)

Entertaining the hypothetical that a U.K. buyer does emerge, it doesn't look like anyone could make the painting's current owner capitulate. It'd be up to the owner to hand over the work of his or her own accord.

But if Britain was so concerned about keeping the Rubens in the country on account of its cultural significance — it was painted in London — it had the opportunity to buy it at the public Christie's sale from which it was acquired by the current owner in December 2005. They shouldn't be able to call a do-over because of a technical misstep.